I started the comic back in 2008. Back then I was doing it as a way to entertain friends on Facebook. I’d do 4 or 5 pages at a time and publish three times a week. I never really thought about putting them in a “comic book format” as I had come off doing a million TechTV comic strips and was still tied to that format.
Eventually, I experimented with a “Graphics Novel” of 20 or 30 pages at a time and switched over to that in a weekly format. That first series, “The Media Elite” was supposed to last forever. Back then, if I had my way, you’d still be reading about my Apple rants and non-ending dissing of politicians all these years later. But, well, life got involved, I got angry and I ended the series.
“The Media Elite Volume 2” came mainly because I screwed up the comics template of the first volume. I mistakenly put down that it was volume two and every time I did a new cover I’d have to correct it. After my meltdown with series one, it got into my head to start over. Something darker, and eventually I tied it into the role playing game I was running with my dear friend James A. Luciani at the time. Super Heroes in a video game world. It was a mess, especially when an upgrade to the software I use broke all my characters for a time (it was UGLY) and that series eventually became the short lived “hey, read it on youtube” animated series.
Series three, “Starshine Downs,” was way more personal. I stripped out most of the main characters and setting and went about as far away from what I knew as I could. Of all of the series, I think I loved Starshine Downs the most. it was my baby, a baby with no plot, of course, but mine all the same… and I learned I can’t write for Elvis Presley’s ghost worth a darn. :X
Series Four, @insanity. It was just weird. A return to the “Media Elite” but not really. I had just upgraded my skills to the adobe package and that series was mainly a way to learn what the hell I was doing with all this neat software. I loved the covers. I put real effort into them and If there was any way to frame them around my house, I would. I think the covers killed that series though. I was putting so much time into finding new ways to do them as art, I lost track of the story and that ultimately ended the series.
Series Five, Amazing Incredible one and… you’ve heard it before. I was trying to update the Media Elite to a modern situation. I was going to go straight into the rest of the series and have them done in a modern format. Yeah, exactly like what I’m doing now. I got bored with it and in the middle of finding where I was going to go with it, the software I use upgraded the head structure and animation system. Another one of these will address what I use, it’s essentially animation software that has “bone riggings” to make the faces perform expressions. That year, they changed the way they do that. All of the heads I use needed to be upgraded to the new faces and I just couldn’t slap a skin on the new from the old ones to make it work. The trouble here was that some of my main characters couldn’t be converted. Bozzie, Johnnie, Timmy, etc. were stock characters from years ago that I had no way of changing over because I didn’t have the original images to use for them. They were out of the box guys that could never be changed. That pretty much killed that series.
Series Six, Amazing Incredible volume two, was the result of those changes. I also decided to abandon the comic book format and went with an internet based format that looked fantastic but… 40 freaking pages?!?!? I was out of my mind. I just couldn’t handle it. I was supposed to be spacing out those pages and writing things like I would a children’s book to make the pages more akin to 20 “comic book pages” but my god, I was reaching and straining and well, that’s why I’m currently rewriting those issues in a comic book format.
The thing with all of these series was that I didn’t have a central plot. The Media Elite and The Media Elite Vol. 2/Universe had a natural cliffhanger and connection, but the rest were really vague. Most didn’t have real endings. I think The Media Elite and @insanity were the only ones that I concluded on my own. The rest kind of fizzled out. But still, other than using the same characters, I didn’t have a connection between them other than my desire to make them better.
So now, we have the zero issues. For the next few weeks I’m filling in the back story of this universe. The Volume six one. You can read all six of the zero issues, along with issue 05-06 as parts of this and then go straight into volume six without reading anything else. Redoing the old series is a vanity thing for myself. I’m not expecting you to read those issues. There’s going to be lots of great stuff in there, but the story I’m currently telling and the world I’m currently focusing on starts with the zeros and goes on with volume six.
I know it’s a lot to take in, but now you’re getting a back story. You’re also getting spoilers in those zero issues and a sense that I’m probably insane.
But you knew that.
Back to work.
Jim